About
Colleen is a Lecturer in Muscle Cell Biology, particularly interested in how exercise, nutrition, ageing and spaceflight/disuse impact skeletal muscle health. Colleen’s Ph.D. focused on understanding the metabolic and molecular mechanisms underpinning muscle regeneration following exercise in youth and older age. Since, Colleen has completed multiple post-doc positions, first investigating the impact of NAD+ precursor supplementation on muscle and mitochondrial health in older adults and the second investigating the mechanisms of and countermeasures to spaceflight-induced muscle decline, which involved sending worms to space as part of the first UK-led experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) – the Molecular Muscle Experiment (MME). Realising the gap of traditional physiologists being able to handle ‘big data’, Colleen was awarded a 3-year MRC fellowship to develop her own bioinformatic skills to investigate the transcriptional basis of skeletal muscle atrophy and hypertrophy. Colleen was also part of the science team that conducted a second experiment on the ISS, the MME2.